


Magical Inheritance

by akire_yta



Series: prompt ficlets [166]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Gen, Magic, meta-fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-17 23:18:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4684946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akire_yta/pseuds/akire_yta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>snarkasaurus and i were discussing Arrow as a magic!au, which led to meta-ficcing</p>
            </blockquote>





	Magical Inheritance

oh man, oh sorry, meta first!  But you could TOTALLY REWRITE ARROW AS A MAGIC AU

 

Some people have magic, but it’s rare.  accepted, known, but rare, and usually fairly low powered.  even then, you get dragged off into programs and special training and basically govt servitude.  Magic users don’t have the best rep.

Oliver never had to worry.  He wasn’t magic.  No-one in his family was.  But they were rich and powerful and life was fun.  Playboy Oliver, basically

Then the Queen’s Gambit sinks, and he’s stuck on the island.  And shit happens.

And when he is rescued, he’s using magic to light the flare.  His magic has emerged under the stress of the island.

There was a lot of stress.  There’s now a lot of magic. Sin and her father taught him the basics of how to control it, and he’s had a lot of time to think it through and practice without anyone seeing.

But Oliver can’t let people know.  He has a mission.

He has  to save his city.

And he meets Dig, who has really low level magic, just enough to have tipped him into one of those programs as a kid, but he was happy to go because his brother, who had more magic, was there too.  And his brother is killed by Deadshot, and, well, Dig’s magic is weak enough that he’s allowed to go into personal protection, where a lot of ppl with enough magic to be suspicious but not enough to be useful to the military go.  But just because he’s shit with his powers doesn’t mean he’s shit as a soldier.  Dig likes to think he’d have chosen service anyway, if he had a choice.  And his powers are shit weak, yeah, but it doesn’t take a class one seer to know that that Queen kid is hiding something big.

He signs on when Oliver gives him the choice.  Dig’s strongest area was reading auras, and something in the play of colour and light he sees when Oliver drops his masks speaks deeply to him.

Felicity is harder to read.  Dig knows she’s holding something in, she stinks of a fear of being caught, found out.  Dig doesn’t even know how Oliver found her, buried deep in a back warren of the Queen Consolidated IT division.  Dig’s still enough of a soldier to know a bolthole when he sees one, even if it’s in a cubefarm.

Dig soon understands.  Technomancy is a new area of magic, not even recognized by a lot of the old guard, the existing programs.  There’s still debate if it’s an area of magic at all.  Dig was in the programs, he can only guess what might have happened to a girl like Felicity if the govt decided to take an interest in her.  Luckily, they got to her first.  Dig knows magic, but Oliver and Felicity  _feel_  it in a way he can’t quite grasp.  He loves watching their auras intertwine when they work.

There are others. Sarah, who had magic, was destined for the programs when she’d taken one last fling on the Queen’s Gambit and ended up officially dead and free for Ras al Gul to scoop up and mould instead.  Helena, whose rage fanned the tiniest spark of magic up into a kind of flame that was consuming her and which could not last.  Roy, who didn’t have magic but, with the Mirikura, was now in possession of gifts he was never intended to have.

No-one made the connection with Malcolm Merlin, whose dark and necromantic powers drove him to madness, and sweet little Thea until it was too late.

Magic was usually inherited, after all

Oliver wears the hood so no-one, magical or not, can identify him.  It’s the only way he and his team can save the city.


End file.
